Wedding Planning - Post #4 - Honeymoon!

We did things a little backwards.  We picked our Honeymoon location before we have even decided on a caterer and we knew before we even booked SweetWater Brewery.  Really, isn't that the 2nd best thing about a wedding - 2nd only to starting the rest of your life married to your best friend?  The next 100 or so days is going to be somewhere along the range from semi-stressful to very stressful and a honeymoon with no stress is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Stephen and I had been checking the online deal sites for their trip deals.  He checked Groupon all the time and I was always checking Living Social.  There were some amazing deals out there - 7-day surf trips to Costa Rica to 5-day spa vacations to the US Virgin Islands.  The problem with most of them was how quickly we'd have to use the deal.  Most of them expired by the end of June or July.  We didn't want to rush to get married that quickly!

One day Stephen found an all-inclusive, 5-night trip to Jamaica at a great price, less than $1000.  (I'd rather not share the exact cost of our amazing deal.)  The deal has to be used by October.  We jumped on it.  So there you have it - our honeymoon is booked!

Photo from Coyaba Resort Jamaica website

We will be spending our Honeymoon in Montego Bay, Jamaica at the Coyaba Resort Jamaica.  The resort is a privately owned hotel with 50 rooms, all with an ocean view.  It has all of the benefits of an all-inclusive resort, without the large crowds that we expect will be in Jamaica in August.  The resort has three restaurants and bars, a pool and a stretch of private beach. They even have a really pretty dock with chairs all the way out to the gazebo.

We upgraded our room for $25 a night to the Ocean Junior Suite which will be a larger room and balcony with a sitting area.  We never upgrade our rooms, but we'll only go on one Honeymoon, we wanted the best.

All of our non-motorized water activities are included in our room rate and we can pay for everything else.  We can take day trips from the hotel to experience more of the island.  I can't wait!  Another bonus is that the resort is only 10 minutes from the airport so we aren't going to spend all of our first day traveling.

Photo from Coyaba Resort Jamaica website

We leave for our trip on the Sunday after our wedding and we'll be returning the following Friday.  That gives us the weekend to get back to normal, let Mabel know we didn't leave her forever, and enjoy being husband and wife in our own home.

Click here to see a photo gallery of the resort.

We booked the stay long before we booked our plane tickets.  We watched AirTran and Delta for about 2 weeks on Bing and Kayak.com before making our decision to buy.  Prices were steady for about 3 weeks on AirTran and Delta dropped to match so we jumped on the Delta tickets.  We'll get our Skymiles for the trip for the same price we would have paid on AirTran, without Skymiles.  I'm glad we waited to buy.  I'm so loyal to Delta.

If anyone has an excursion that we must do while in Jamaica, let us know in the comments.